Jackpot!

I'm sending a great big thank you to Familysearch.org and all of their indexing volunteers for getting the 1905 New York state census indexed and placed on their website. Last night I was able to find my Great Grandma Ward with her parents and her brother living in Manhattan thanks to the index. I've searched city directories and the 1910 federal enumeration with no luck; George Ward is just too common of a name and I was never sure who was who. Thanks to the index and being able to find them in the 1905 state enumeration, I now have an address to work with to help sort the same-namers out.

The state census for 1905 New York does not provide a heck of a lot of info, but can be helpful just for the sake of being able to locate people, at it is in my case. The house number and street are given, as well as the name of the head of household and the relationships of those living with him. Age, gender, race, place of birth (however this is only given as country of birth, states are not given on the section that I was working with so only "US" is given as POB), whether citizen or alien, and occupation are also given for all in the household. So it's a pretty standard enumeration but since it falls in between two federal enumerations, it can really help you out when you're trying to locate people and not succeeding with the federal censuses and city directories.

It's also nice to have one more enumeration with the whole family together before things start to get dicey. My Great Grandma's mother dies in October of 1905, just a few months after the June enumeration date of the state census, and none of the other members of the family have been found in the 1910 census. In fact, my Great Grandma goes missing until 1930 when she turns up in IL with my Grandma, who is aged 18. So this 1905 enumeration is now the last appearance for most of this family group until I can manage to track them down elsewhere. It looks like things really changed after the Mother in the family died because they seem to just disappear. Getting this address is a great start though because now I can sort through the city directories again to try to see if there was a Ward living at the address from the 1905 enumeration. I'm wondering if perhaps after the death of his wife, the family may have moved from Manhattan though since none of them seem to show up in the 1910 census. I may have found Raymond living as a boarder in one of the other boroughs, but I'm not completely positive that it's the same person. So for now it's a mystery. But I'm very happy to have been given the use of the index to locate them in the first place so that my research can continue.